On Sunday 26 April 2009 05:39:52 fe...@crowfix.com wrote: > On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 08:27:08PM -0500, Dale wrote: > > And from experience, I can tell you it happens when you don't use that > > -1 option when you should. You can end up with a HUGE world file when > > not using that opton to just rebuild something for some reason or other. > > I am probably in that very situation. My world file is 5794 lines > long. I didn't know about -1 and frankly don't understand it. If I > remerge a package which is not in world, why is it added to world? I > had seen a few vague references to -1, but just assumed that portage > was smart enough to only add new packages.
The "world" file (/var/lib/portage/world) is a list of packages you manually emerged. The only way a package ever gets into world is if you, the user, ran emerge <some_package>. Portage then considers that you know what you are doing, and want to have that package around for ever (or till you remove it). You probably want a browser on your system, so "emerge firefox" puts it in world. Don't worry about X, it's drivers and the huge list of little independent packages that comprise X as firefox has dependencies in it's ebuild file that cause X to be merged if it's not already installed. The problem with putting everything in world is that you remove portage's ability to clean up junk - it will not remove a package in world when you do a --depclean. This usually happens when you need to update some package to get something else to work, so you emerge it. It then goes into world and you get the bloat. You can avoid this by using the -1 option when doing such an action. -- alan dot mckinnon at gmail dot com
